On Sun, Sep 30, 2007 at 05:10:22PM -0400, Paul Spencer wrote: > What do others think about this? Should OSGeo be in the business of > helping new OSGeo projects get off the ground?
I do not think that OSGeo should be in the business of setting up infrastructure and resources for all open source projects that are out there. Our incubation process, as it is, is relatively lengthy and resource consuming -- without a significant influx of new OSGeo incubation mentors, I don't see how OSGeo can offer more than it already does. As a volunteer run organization, I see OSGeo as already being at the stretching point (though not the breaking point). Many incubation mentors also participate on other committees, or are trying to maintain multiple things at once for OSGeo. Adding more burden onto that at this time seems to be a mistake. Creating more resources for projects on how to get started with an Open Source Geospatial project sounds great. In fact, so does providing infrastructure to projects which seem likely to be widely used in a givene space. For example, it's clear that a well-maintained proj4js library could be used by a number of projects -- but it hasn't shown a strong enough community so far that I would feel comfortable having OSGeo provide much in the way of resources for it, especially as part of the incubation process. (3-4 users does not a community make.) I said in a presentation last week: "A developer's time is a limited resource. Don't waste it." I think the same applies to OSGeo resources: until we have some number of resources which is larger than what we have today, I think that we need to hold off on promising anything more to projects, especially projects which are not clearly in a position to succeed yet. I look forward to the day when OSGeo can take promising projects and provide them a route from start to finish, creating what is likely a more successful project due to OSGeo's integration into the process. However, I feel like we're stretched pretty thin at this time, so until the day where we have people in hordes waiting for things to do, I don't think we're at a point where I feel it's the best action for the foundation. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss